Britain has gone from God-fearing to God-jeering

Well written piece in the Telegraph today from Alison Pearson:

I’m not sure what I believe, but I do know every word of the Creed, and when I say them I feel I am joining myself to generations who spoke those words centuries before I was born, and that custom is deeply consoling. I thought about my friend, stranded in New York by snow when her son was hurt in a car crash. Ann hadn’t prayed for years, but she slipped into a church on Fifth Avenue, “I can’t manage it alone,” she emailed, “I know that sounds strange.” Religion is strange, infinitely mysterious and easy to mock, but all I can say is that its rituals feel full, not hollow, as so much of modern life does. The [Richard Dawkins followers] argue that you don’t need organised religion to hand down the wisdom of ages or a system of morality. Don’t you?

Richard Dawkins on truth

Dawkins defends scientific truth in the Times online.

A scientist arrogantly asserts that thunder is not the triumphal sound of God’s balls banging together, nor is it Thor’s hammer. It is, instead, the reverberating echoes from the electrical discharges that we see as lightning. Poetic (or at least stirring) as those tribal myths may be, they are not actually true.

But now a certain kind of anthropologist can be relied on to jump up and say something like the following: Who are you to elevate scientific “truth” so? The tribal beliefs are true in the sense that they hang together in a meshwork of consistency with the rest of the tribe’s world view. Scientific “truth” is only one kind (“Western” truth, the anthropologist may call it, or even “patriarchal”). Like tribal truths, yours merely hang together with the world view that you happen to hold, which you call scientific. An extreme version of this viewpoint (I have actually encountered this) goes so far as to say that logic and evidence themselves are nothing more than instruments of masculine oppression over the “intuitive mind”.

Listen, anthropologist. Just as you entrust your travel to a Boeing 747 rather than a magic carpet or a broomstick; just as you take your tumour to the best surgeon available, rather than a shaman or a mundu mugu, so you will find that the scientific version of truth works. You can use it to navigate through the real world. Science predicts, with complete certainty unless the end of the world intervenes, that the city of Shanghai will experience a total eclipse of the sun on July 22, 2009. Theories about the moon god devouring the sun god may be poetic, and they may cohere with other aspects of a tribe’s world view, but they won’t predict the date, time and place of an eclipse. Science will, and with an accuracy you could set your watch by. Science gets you to the moon and back. Even if we bend over backwards to concede that scientific truth is no more than that which enables you to pilot your way reliably, safely and predictably around the real universe, it is in exactly this sense that – at the very least – evolution is true. Evolutionary theory pilots us around biology reliably and predictively, with a detailed and unblemished success that rivals anything in science. The least you can say about evolutionary theory is that it works. All but pedants would go further and assert that it is true.

via The gospel according to Darwin Richard Dawkins TLS.

For the most part I agree. However, what Dawkins has done is simply defend the use of the word ‘true’ in scientific thinking. He has argued that if something can be shown to scientifically ‘work’, we can call it true. This is mere semantics. What he hasn’t done is equated ‘truth’ with conclusive proof as he would like us to believe.

What a lot of fuss an ad can make

Yes, there’s more on the Atheist Bus Campaign, which went live this week in several UK cities. Now, it seems, the debate is going to be opened up even more, with the Advertising Standards agency looking into it. Not sure Clifford Longley’s is the best approach, but the debate will certainly be fun.

Clifford Longley is quoted on The Times blog.

Scientists believe in God

According to the Daily Mail, scientists believe in God. Not all of them, I’m sure, but Jonathan Margolis wrote an interesting articlejust before Christmas – I’ve only just been passed it. He interviews several eminent scientists about their beleif in God. Not a definitive article by any means, but interesting nonetheless.

Similarly, Oxford mathematics professor John Lennox argues: ‘This misapprehension that faith is a religious thing not involved in science is simply false. I see the two as belonging together.’

The softly-spoken Ulsterman added: ‘But science is limited. That’s no insult to science, but as I recently told Richard Dawkins, I could dissect him, run his brain through a scanner, reduce him to chemicals and tell a great deal about him. ‘But I’d never get to know him as a person. For that, he must reveal himself to me.’

Professor Lennox said that God has revealed himself at several levels, in the universe and creation.

‘Science gives us pointers towards God, but you don’t get proofs; you get evidence. And faith is evidence-based – not based on lack of evidence, as Dawkins says.’

U.S. getting its own atheism bus campaign

Further to a recent post of mine about atheists advertising on london buses, the American Humanist Association has decided to get in on the act.

Atheists seem to have a thing for buses. We recently wrote about the bus ads in London which proclaimed, “There’s probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life.” Along these same lines, Washington, D.C., is now getting its own atheist bus campaign, headlined, “Why believe in a god? Just be good for goodness’ sake.” The advertiser is the American Humanist Association, which is putting $40,000 into the holiday campaign. An AHA rep says the group is running the ads now because “there are an awful lot of agnostics, atheists and other types of non-theists who feel a little alone during the holidays because of its association with traditional religion.” (Can’t they just comfort themselves with some rampant consumerism?) For its part, the American Family Association was typically eloquent in denouncing the effort. “It’s a stupid ad,” says a rep there.

via AdFreak: U.S. getting its own atheism bus campaign

Interesting that they decide to take morality as their theme. From where does morality come?

Atheists Advertise

The godless move in mysterious ways: what the atheist bus campaign’s advert will look like. Ariane Sherine: All aboard the atheist bus campaign -  guardian.co.uk

I would add:

1. Why are they advertising – what benefits will they get?

2. The presumption that the there is no-God will lead people to enjoy their life is flawed.

3. Advertising is usually used to propagate or open up a perceived need in the person who sees the advert. This does not to that.

4. Surely the most powerful thing that leads people towards the non-existence of God is simply that many don’t really think about it. This campaign forces people to think about God!

Here’s a billboard advert I found that was quite fun.

The atheist delusion

There’s a great article in the Guardian from a couple of days ago talking about Dawkins, Hitchens and the new breed of atheists that seem to be zealous about their faith. He underlines the flaws in believing solely in scientific progress, and highlights some of the less than scientific theories that it is built upon. I don’t pretend to understand it all but it’s worth a read.

Some thoughts on the origin of the universe

Dawkins (and some others like him) expose the view that there is no God. The universe came about through natural processes. There is nothing eternal that had to have kicked off this process, and no need for a creator.

There are lots of other theories out there – creationism (God created the universe literally as it is recorded in the Bible), evolution, Intelligent design. Some say the big bang started everything off. But what caused that? Where did the matter comes from? I see three options which can begin to explain the origin of life. All theories fit within one of these three options (from David Robertson, ‘The Dawkins letters’ p58 )

1. Something came from nothing. At one point there was no universe, there was no material, there was no matter [physical stuff], no time, no space. And out of that big nothing there came the Big Bang and out vast universe, tiny planet, evolution and the human species. Such a notion is beyond the realms of reason and is a total nonsensical fantasy

2. Something was eternal. In other words matter has always existed. There is a lump of rock, or a mass of gas, or some kind of matter which had no beginning and will probably have no end. And at some point that matter exploded and we ended up with the finely tuned and wonderful universe we now inhabit

3. Something was created – ex nihilo – out of nothing. And that Creator has to be incredibly powerful, intelligent and awesome beyond our imagination.

So we either have the universe being created out of nothing by no-one, the physical material which makes up the universe having always existed, or we need a creator. There are no other logical choices.

I do not subscribe to creationism – you do not need to in order to take the Bible seriously. Likewise there are flaws in the theory of evolution and in the theory of Intelligent Design. But the simple existence of ourselves and our universe necessitates something eternal. Either the universe was eternal (option 2), or it was created by something (option 3). There is no other logical option.

Some more quotes from eminent scientists (both quoted in ‘The Dawkins Letters’, p64):

“The best data we have are exactly what I would have predicted had I nothing to go on but the five books of Moses, the Psalms, and the Bible as a whole” (Arno Penzias, Nobel-prize winner for his work on finding background radiation which supports the theory of the Big Bang)

“It would be very difficult to explain why the universe should have begun in just this way, except as the act of God who intended to create beings like us” (Stephen Hawking, in ‘A Brief History of Time’)